SOE Shuttering Vanguard, Free Realms, Wizardry, More

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All good things must come to an end. Even MMOs, and – at least, these days – especially MMOs. Between shifting business models and “there ain’t room enough in this town for the six thousand of us” syndrome, niche standouts are finding it harder and harder to keep their heads above water. That sorry truth curling up like a cold, uncaring cat on our hearts and minds, let’s bid farewell to Vanguard, Wizardry Online, Free Realms, and Star Wars: Clone Wars Adventures.

Star Wars and Free Realms will be getting their cords snipped first, with servers coming down on March 31st. Vanguard and Wizardry Online, meanwhile, will be stuffed into flaming coffins and set off to sea on July 31st. It’s all being done in the name of “refocusing resources,” but Vanguard’s developers were especially upfront about it:

“Here’s the deal… player population numbers have decreased making it difficult to justify the resources needed to support and update this game. This is an older game and we’re experiencing more and more technical challenges to continue running and updating it in a way you deserve. Simply put, these are issues that cannot be fixed in the long term and as a player, we would be doing you a disservice and going against our company commitment to provide the best gameplay experiences. So given this information, sunsetting the game later this year is the inevitable conclusion.”

“Again, this is not a decision that we approached lightly or without serious thought and examination. We’ve grown with you and the community throughout the years and shutting down the game is certainly not ideal, but necessary regardless.”

Bummer, but that seems to be the way of the (massively multiplayer online) world these days. Did you spend any particularly memorable days, months, years, or centuries with these games? Were they homes away from home, or just brief vacation spots that you mostly forgot about after a few too many fruit-engorged tiki drinks? Do you regularly down big-gulp-sized tiki drinks while playing MMOs, or is that just me?

36 Comments

Vanguard was a wonderful game. Well, it was massively flawed at launch, where even top of the line computer struggled to play the game decently, but its massive world, interesting landscapes, huge cities, complex and very rewarding classes (Bloodmage and Bard comes to mind) havent’ really been duplicated as well in other games. Hell, small things like psionicists having their own chatchannel if they used a special mindbuff because they communicated via mindlink was an awesome idea.

Crafting is also the best possible crafting way I’ve seen in MMO’s and the fact that you could build your own Ships and houses is STILL not replicated in any way that I know of in any other MMO’s out there.

I think again in the case of Vanguard, that SOE REALLY tried to make it work. They’ve had a lot of developers on it lately, and well, it was just broken too much, unfortunately.

Had some good times in Vanguard when it was new. I kind of regret not sticking with it longer until more of the issues where ironed out. Usual story of too many games not enough time, so the one I’m paying a monthly sub to gets the chop.

Vanguard is truly the game most ripe with potential, but which failed to execute it properly. I spend about half a year playing the game almost every day, before the endgame(or lack thereof) robbed me of my motivation.

A beautiful world, even though the game is 7 years old, it still looks great and just exploring it is a joy.
Lots of diverse classes (though I dislike, that most classes are pigeonholed into one role). But where it failed beyond the disastrous launch is the game was to make stuff interesting.

Adventuring is mostly a grind once you get past level 20, with quests literally asking you to kill hundreds of monsters for a meager reward.
When I first played it, it felt to me like the designers had everything fleshed out until lvl 20, but didn’t go farther, leaving only barebones quest structures at the higher levels.
In the dungeons you can spend many hours fighting your way through the hordes and dying without a way to revive someone on the spot can be catastrophic as dungeons are not instanced and as such respawn rates are fairly quick.
It reaches its epitome in the lvl 50+ area, some island, they introduced later. Where you have to do daily quests for MONTHS, just to reach the next level of reputation. This was, what killed the game for me, spending 1-2 hours to do a handful of quests with barely any benefit, urgh.

Crafting, while interesting is also repetetive and a very slow grind to get to the higher levels and then you have to spend a lot of time mining the rare and ultra rare materials. Though the number of crafting options this game offers is insane, pretty much any stat distribution you want on an item, ability to build houses, ships and furniture, a lot of creativity can be displayed here.

Finally, diplomacy was the part I liked the most, it’s a fairly simple card game, which unfortunately is also very easy. The main problem here is, that it just stops. You have a long quest until lvl 20 (which then pretty much in the middle), then you can some more and that’s it. from lvl 25+ it’s just a grind to get max lvl and you never need it again for anything before reaching max lvl.
Another sign, that the game was rushed out too early.

SOE also made some questionable decisions, when they switched to f2p. Powerful items, like massive bags with stat boosts for money. Flying mounts, which were very hard to obtain before now freely available and sellable everywhere.

Way, way, WAY back in the day when I was playing the original Everquest I remember a guild mate constantly banging on about a recently announced game called Vanguard and how it was going to be the next big thing.

Honestly dont think I’ve even thought about it since those early preview days, let alone seen or played it.

Pft, i remember when my finger was on the pulse. Now I’m just part of the problem :)

Yeah, Vanguard shall be missed. I have a few fond memories of it, back from the early days – especially of the Diplomacy element of the game. Even if it wasn’t perfect, at least they tried to innovate.

In addition to shutting these MMOs down, SOE is implementing an “All Access” pass for all their other MMOs. Basically, you pay $15 (or equivalent) and get subscriber access to all their MMOs along with 500 SC/month which is pretty cool.

SWTOR is not part of SOE’s lineup, unfortunately. Different company :-)

As for there being a Wizardry MMO – There really isn’t. Its the Japanese edition of Wizardry, where they have gotten a TON of weird iterations with the name Wizardry stuck to it for some reason. It has nothing to do with Wizardry of old.

You say they don’t lose any money by doing it but leaving aside the technology licensing issues, if your former players are still playing your old game that you’re making no money from then they aren’t playing your new games that you do make money on.

Typical from SOE: the people working on the game would probably know nothing of this closure. Remember the times when the NGE launched in Star Wars Galaxies while still promising features for the “original” game and just after a new expansion :..(

I don’t play MMOs, but every news like this makes me angry.
It’s digital equivalent of smashing ancient vase on the floor, because we found another one that need to be exposed and pervious one is wasting space and resources.

It costs money to run the servers and to do maintenance, so in effect they are wasting space and resources. They’re for profit companies, not museums. It would be nice if there was a way to archive games such as this but when you’ve got licensed material such as Star Wars that’s certainly impossible, and I’ve no idea what other legal wrangling might be involved. Perhaps be sad but don’t be angry, you can’t expect them to prop up games that aren’t making money out of the goodness of their heart.

this is exactly why I do not understand the gamers that are in favor of a ‘digital future’. It’s not just MMO games either, there’s games vanishing from other online gaming services also, by going purely digital these companies kind of have the power to erase a part of gaming history.

Watching a lets play on Youtube isn’t the same as playing an old game yourself.

Not quite sure what your point is. Not to be pedantic, but all PC games are ‘purely digital’. If by ‘digital future’ you mean ‘online’ I still don’t get it: few old games would still be played if not for online distribution (and emulation). If your point is against persistent online games, of course those won’t be around if a company cancels pulls the plug (on a game, or itself). If you mean the medium used to transfer copies of the game: I doubt many people like holding on to storage media and the hardware required to run them. My PC doesn’t even have a CD/DVD drive.

Digital Distribution makes things easier on the publisher, helping to fight piracy and cutting costs for them, but it doesn’t cut costs for us, the only good thing we get out of it is we get our games a little quicker and without having to leave our homes. The problem is it ties games to these distribution services, and once their taken down, there becomes no other way to get your hands on the game. And what do you mean PC games are purely digital? I bought physical copies of Skyrim, Deus Ex, and Mass Effect 3

Because they are just video games man. The pros of the digital age here far out wiegh the cons of not being able to play some MMO 20 years after it was being actively developed. Besides this argument really only applies to MMOs and always online games setup like MMOs whci are very few in actuallity with most of those thesedays being glorified scams made to get you addicted to spend money on microtransactions. The ones worth saving will be. Just go to piratebay or GoG for proof of that.

We no longer have the resources to dedicate to maintaining the code base such that it can stay in sync with our platform and our security needs. We’ve been running it at a loss for a long time. We haven’t told the players that but we felt it was the right thing to do to keep it running. We’ve done it for 7 years and it’s just time to shut it down.

I liked vanguard, but didn’t stick with it past a couple of days. The sheer size and feel of the world were very compelling to me. I’d love to play a game that has that scope for me to explore, without trappings I enjoy less.

In yet other SOE news, Jp1138 and others may be interested in what J. Smedley said in a recent Reddit AMA:

SWG PLAYERS – OUR NEXT GAME (not announced yet) IS DEDICATED TO YOU. Once we launch it… you can come home now.

I don’t know what this means. But as a gamer who was with SWG from before it launched though the NGE, I hope this means SWG’s skills system and resource-based crafting (in presumably a non-Star Wars wrapper, which is fine by me).

Update: Smed has since tweeted that this isn’t a new Star Wars game. Which is fine by me; it was never the licensed setting that made pre-NGE SWG special. (Not perfect, just a particular kind of gameplay that’s been hard to find.)